Hemlock Alley right off of Polk is always featuring some cool street art, whether it’s from an artist showing at Space Gallery around the corner or at White Walls/Shooting Gallery/941 Geary just a couple of blocks away. Most recently we admired a few interesting pieces that didn’t seem to be connected to any particular show. We recognized this one as being by the same artist who put up the Howard Zinn mural on Valencia street.

He appears to be an Iranian artist that goes by the name ABCNT, and this is one of his many portraits of revolutionary or guerrilla portraits.

The Gandhi and Ganesh murals are apparently the work of Cryptik Movement, a group of artists doing public art “dedicated to helping humanity evolve towards greater awareness and understanding […] to facilitate the development of a deeper, more meaningful philosophy of life”. ABCNT is probably part of this group, although this is unclear.

Today we were surprised to see that all the murals above are already gone from Hemlock Alley after barely two weeks there. Now a new large mural that seems to be the work of the Australian Young & Free collective has replaced them. The group has a show at the 941 Geary gallery until October 22nd, opening tonight. The mural of the woman with the sad eyes on Sutter is also by a one of the Young & Free artists.

We were able to identify some of the characters in this huge mashup of street art, such as the stencils of a bearded man by Ha-Ha, or the guy with lasers in his eyes which seems to be by Lister. We’re not sure about this bloody Pluto, though…

There’s a second mural across the street looks like the works of Dabs & Myla who I’m pretty sure are also the artists behind the Califor’ya mural at 7th & Folsom is also their work…

So go check out this rainbow of awesome that is Hemlock before it’s too late, and while you’re there you should also pay your respects to the UA Galaxy if you haven’t already.

>Update

Here’s a cool video by Colin Day showing the various Australian artists of the Young and Free show putting up their work on the walls of Hemlock Alley. Enjoy.